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The state of Ceará, in Northeast Brazil, contributes only to 2% of the Brazilian GDP. Yet, it will soon host the Brazil’s largest public broadband Internet network. The Cinturão Digital do Ceará (CDC), which translates as Ceará’s Digital Big Belt, will be inaugurated this Thursday by the governor Cid Gomes and the Science and Technology Minister Aloizio Mercadante. So why did the local authorities decide to invest around R$50m (US$28.6m) into this initiative?

Many people couldn’t afford faster speeds anyway – in Fortaleza, one third of the population lives in favelas (slums) filled with migrants who have left rural areas.

This situation led the state to develop its own public network, the CDC. It is a highly ambitious project; according to the government, it consists of a whopping 2,600 kilometers of optic fiber.

Before the American people were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the president managed to sign an international treaty which would permit foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight. Entitled the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty was signed by Obama on October 1, 2011, but it is currently a subject of discussion because the White House is circulating a petition demanding that senators ratify the treaty.

the White House has done some maneuvering — characterizing the treaty as an "executive agreement" — thereby bypassing approval by members of Congress. Concerned by this action of the administration, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., above left) sent a letter to President Obama in which he declared: It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law. But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law ... the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress' authority, absent congressional approval.

Similarly, TechDirt observes: ... [E]ven if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement? The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the President legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.

Google Offers went live in Brooklyn, New York today, much to the happiness of everyone from Kings County to Gowanus. Google Offers, a direct competitor to companies like Groupon and Living Social, first landed in Manhattan this past July with Belgian fries and mango chutney at Pommes Frites. Today, Google’s daily deal service is offering $4 general admission tickets to the New York Aquarium, which is 73% off the normal $14.95 price tag. The Aquarium, which is located just off the Coney Island boardwalk is open year round and features animals such as California sea lions, stingrays, tropical fish, moray eels, penguins, seals, otters, walruses, starfish, sea turtles and sharks!

Location Media Microsoft Mobile Sessions Shareables Social Media Twitter Video Editions Africa Asia Australia Canada Europe India Latin America Middle East UK United States Languages France Nederland Polska Portugal Romania Russia Google Offers is now live in Brooklyn: Starting with $4 for SHARKS! 9th November 2011 by Courtney Boyd Myers Google Offers went live in Brooklyn, New York today, much to the happiness of everyone from Kings County to Gowanus. Google Offers, a direct competitor to companies like Groupon and Living Social, first landed in Manhattan this past July with Belgian fries and mango chutney at Pommes Frites. Today, Google’s daily deal service is offering $4 general admission tickets to the New York Aquarium, which is 73% off the normal $14.95 price tag. The Aquarium, which is located just off the Coney Island boardwalk is open year round and features animals such as California sea lions, stingrays, tropical fish, moray eels, penguins, seals, otters, walruses, starfish, sea turtles and sharks!

PayByPhone, a leading international provider of systems for parking and urban mobility payments, has announced one of the largest deployments of near field communications (NFC) payment solutions in the world. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which selected the PayByPhone mobile payment system for parking, is currently adding NFC-enabled stickers to the city's 30,800 parking spaces to give drivers the option to pay for parking with NFC-enabled mobile phones in addition to mobile apps and mobile web for regular phones. All parking meters continue to accept payment with coins.

The PayByPhone system, already deployed in the Castro district will be extended citywide as installation of the stickers is completed. The PayByPhone NFC sticker has a passive electronic chip that does not require a battery and stores information such as the parking space number that can be read wirelessly by any NFC-enabled phone.

Since each meter in San Francisco will have a PayByPhone sticker, users can simply wave or tap their NFC-enabled phones over the NFC sticker on the meter to automatically launch the parking application. The mobile payment system recognizes the user, identifies the individual parking location, and the driver enters the desired parking time to complete the transaction. The system then sends a text message reminder before the parking period expires, and if needed, allows additional time to be purchased by phone from any location (subject to time limit restrictions). A receipt is automatically sent to the user's email account. Payment is processed against a credit or debit card associated with the mobile phone number.

The arrival of NFC in handsets has been talked about since the world was young, but big steps are finally being taken towards making its availability more widespread. Samsung’s new Galaxy Nexus device supports NFC through Google Wallet; RIM and Telefónica recently announced a new trial of the technology in Europe next year; and America’s big three networks have formed the ISIS alliance to enable a common architecture for NFC mobile payments.

There have been rumours that Microsoft is working on an NFC payment platform to rival Google Wallet, while this week, it was suggested that NFC will soon play a part in how Microsoft devices communicate with each other. Coleman didn’t spill the beans on any specifics, but did say that “in the not too distant future, there are some exciting things that will be coming through with NFC from Microsoft.”

In an interview on Windows Phone with TechRadar, Will Coleman, product manager at Microsoft UK, said that “NFC is supported by it, but needs to be enabled by the OEM. So if any [manufacturer] wants to enable it, that can be done by all means.”

Wireless bandwidth is like land in Manhattan -- it's extremely valuable because they're not making more of it.

But we sure are using more of it. The wireless-industry association CTIA reported in October 2011 that the number of wireless devices in the U.S. had, for the first time, exceeded the number of people. And Mobile Future, a coalition of vendors and consumers, estimated in a March 2011 report that by 2014, voice traffic will comprise only 2% of the total wireless traffic in the United States -- a worrisome statistic because, as the report noted, smartphones consume 24 times more data than old-school cell phones, and tablets consume 120 times more data than smartphones. (See Data needs bandwidth, but how much? for details.)

The result: Wireless networks are edging near capacity, not just in the United States, but all over the world. Credit Suisse conducted a survey last year that revealed mobile networks in North America were running at 80% of capacity, with 36% of base stations facing capacity constraints. The average globally for base station capacity utilization, the report said, was 65%.

Today Intuit has announced that GoPayment, a mobile applications tailored to process credit card payments, is available in the App Store for the iPhone or iPod touch.

The app essentially turns the iPhone or iPod touch into a credit card terminal that can process payments, track past charges, and generate electronic receipts for the customer. Rather than wait for checks to clear or invoices to be paid, transactions can be processed on the spot via mobile connection. Card information can be inputted manually, or synced via a bluetooth enabled card swipe device. Intuit also assures that information is never stored on the handset, and that data is protected during transmission with financial industry standard technology.

t will definitely be a while before people feel comfortable swiping credit cards through a mobile device, but as large, reputable companies like Intuit enter the space the stigma surrounding mobile payments may slowly wane.

Cloud provider CloudSigma has become the first to add solid-state-drive storage to its public cloud computing service. SSDs (aka flash memory) are well known for their ability to significantly increase storage I/O performance and decrease power consumption when compared with hard disk drives, but until recently they have been too expensive for consideration in most data centers that aren’t backed by serious computing needs and deep pockets. That’s starting to change with the advent of new companies promising ever-lower prices on enterprise-grade flash storage, but making flash available as a service to cloud customers is still relatively unheard of.

However, adding flash is just par for the course for CloudSigma, which has been making a name for itself on high performance and customer choice since launching in the United States recently. The company’s U.S. presence is based out of the mind-blowing SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas, and CloudSigma chose 10 GbE interconnects as its standard to ensure its cloud can fully utilize the throughput horsepower of new technologies like flash. A couple weeks ago, it announced support of Oracle’s Solaris operating system, which also is unique among cloud providers (although Amazon Web Services does support OpenSolaris).

Although SSDs in the cloud are cool enough by themselves, they’re part of a larger trend toward making cloud computing a more palatable delivery model for all types of workloads. What began as a platform for hosting web applications has expand to enterprise apps such as ERP software from SAP, and even into massively parallel HPC workloads. AWS even offers GPU instances on an HPC cluster, which has resulted in several companies benchmarking AWS as among the fastest supercomputers in the world. Jenkins said CloudSigma will “absolutely” offer GPUs at some point, and might even go as far as to expose specific processors for rendering digital media.

Twitter was born as a text messaging service; tweets are 140 characters because that is the length of a text message, minus a few characters for the author’s name.Today, though, most people in the United States think about Twitter as a Web tool, and they use it either online or via smartphone apps.But Twitter has not forgotten about all the people in the world who do not have fancy phones. On Friday, the company announced that it had acquired Cloudhopper, a Seattle text-messaging start-up.There is “untapped potential” with Twitter text-message use “Mobile is clearly where the majority of usage will happen,” Evan Williams, Cloudhopper has already been working with Twitter to connect its service directly with mobile carriers around the world, in part so that users do not have to pay extra to send or receive text message tweets. Twitter has long had problems with this, and in the past has had to disable text messaging in certain countries because of high fees.Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com

"Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos says the online retailer won't collect tax from most of its 90 million customers until Congress clearly mandates it. Although a growing number of states are demanding that Amazon collect and remit tax on sales within their borders, such demands are 'interference in interstate commerce' and prohibited by the Constitution, Bezos said."

Near-field communication (NFC) has been trashed by critics, who say it adds no value to consumers or is a technology in search of a need. But as we’ve pointed out, NFC is just a technology that can applied in a lot of different ways, apart from the digital wallet framework through which many people understand it.

Increasingly, we’re seeing more and more interesting projects and applications being built that show how NFC will be deployed outside of mobile payment situations. This not only indicates how flexible the technology is but also could help propel the overall technology in adoption, as consumers become aware of NFC and learn to use it for a variety of reasons.

Right now, NFC is still below the radar for most U.S. consumers, and the slow roll out of Google Wallet or the pending launch of Isis next year are, by themselves, only going to accelerate NFC adoption by so much. But having a host of uses for the technology could open people’s eyes and push them past any usability or safety concerns.

Near-field communication (NFC) has been trashed by critics, who say it adds no value to consumers or is a technology in search of a need. But as we’ve pointed out, NFC is just a technology that can applied in a lot of different ways, apart from the digital wallet framework through which many people understand it.

Increasingly, we’re seeing more and more interesting projects and applications being built that show how NFC will be deployed outside of mobile payment situations. This not only indicates how flexible the technology is but also could help propel the overall technology in adoption, as consumers become aware of NFC and learn to use it for a variety of reasons.

Right now, NFC is still below the radar for most U.S. consumers, and the slow roll out of Google Wallet or the pending launch of Isis next year are, by themselves, only going to accelerate NFC adoption by so much. But having a host of uses for the technology could open people’s eyes and push them past any usability or safety concerns.

Just what might be possible is hinted at in this fascinating post by Andrew Fisher, entitled "Towards a sensor commons": For me the Sensor Commons is a future state whereby we have data available to us, in real time, from a multitude of sensors that are relatively similar in design and method of data acquisition and that data is freely available whether as a data set or by API to use in whatever fashion they like. My definition is not just about “lots of data from lots of sensors” – there is a subtlety to it implied by the “relatively similar in design and method of data acquisition” statement. In order to be useful, we need to ensure we can compare data relatively faithfully across multiple sensors. This doesn’t need to be perfect, nor do they all need to be calibrated together, we simply need to ensure that they are “more or less” recording the same thing with similar levels of precision and consistency. Ultimately in a lot of instances we care about trended data rather than individual points so this isn’t a big problem so long as an individual sensor is relatively consistent and there isn’t ridiculous variation between sensors if they were put in the same conditions.

What this boils down to, then, is trends in freely-available real-time data from multiple sensors: it's about being able to watch the world change across some geographical area of interest -- even a small one -- and drawing conclusions from those changes. That's clearly a huge step up from checking what's in your fridge, and potentially has major political ramifications (unlike the contents of your fridge).

The bulk of the post explores what Fisher sees as the key requirements for a sensor commons, which must:

Big box retailer Home Depot is ramping up its mobile strategy by testing a PayPal-enabled mobile payment solution at select stores

The news marks Home Depot as the first retailer to sign on with PayPal as part of a bigger initiative from Paypal to bridge online and in-store traffic for retailers. The program has been in use since early December in five Home Depot locations in the United States and utilizes PayPal’s point-of-sale mobile payment service.

“Retail is changing with the emergence of these technologies that blur the lines between online and offline,” said Anuj Nayar, director of communications for PayPal, San Jose, CA

A new Greek scientific study has demonstrated how frequency electromagnetic fields, namely cell phones, portable phones, WiFi, and wireless computer equipment, alter important protein changes in the brains of animals. Exposure to electromagnetic frequencies is the result of our advancing technologies, but it is important to study these effects so people know exactly what they’re dealing with in order to take the necessary precautionary measures.

The study, entitled “Brain proteome response following whole body exposure of mice to mobile phone or wireless DECT base radiation,” was published in the journal Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine. Important areas of the brain such as the hippocampus, cerebellum, and frontal lobe are regions responsible for learning, memory, and other functions. These areas are negatively impacted by microwave radiation, even at levels below the safety guidelines put in place by the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation protection

Researchers found that 143 proteins in the brain were negatively impacted by radio frequency radiation over a period of 8 months. A total of 3 hours of cell phone exposure were simulated over the 8 month time period, and the results showed that many neural function related proteins’ functional relationship changed the for worse.

People fed up with the proliferation of credit cards, IDs and key cards that fill their wallets to bulging may soon have an alternative. New technology could bundle such functions into just one item: your cell phone.

Near Field Communication technology, jointly developed by Sony and Royal Philips Electronics, lets wireless devices connect to other devices nearby and transfer data, from payment information to digital pictures. Samsung Electronics and Philips say they are developing cell phones with embedded NFC chips that could double as debit cards or electronic IDs. The companies plan to begin field trials toward the end of the year.

Such phones are already available in Japan and Korea, where users can charge their phones with virtual cash, then wave them near NFC-enabled machines to buy anything from a soda to lunch. But it remains to be seen how Americans will react to the devices, which are not yet available outside Asia, said wireless technology analyst Allen Nogee of In-Stat/MDR.

It’s no secret that credit card companies are shelling out big bucks and aggressively forming partnerships and deals to start cashing in on the mobile and digital payments innovations currently taking place. American Express, which recently debuted its own digital payments product Serve, has been particularly aggressive on the partnerships front, striking recent deals with both Foursquare and Facebook. Mastercard has bet on NFC with a partnership with Google for Google Wallet and bought online payments gateway DataCash for $520 million last fall. And Visa has made a number of major moves in the mobile and digital payments space of late; including making an investment (and taking on an advisory role) in disruptive startup Square, buying virtual goods payments platform PlaySpan for $190 million, and acquiring mobile payments company Fundamo for $110 million. We sat down with Visa’s Global Head of Mobile Product Bill Gajda and the company’s Head of Global Product Strategy, Innovation and eCommerce Jennifer Schulz to discuss how the financial company is planning to compete in both mobile and digital payments.

In May, Visa announced its plans for the digital wallet. We’ll explain this initiative later in the post, but part of this platform would allow you to access your loyalty points, credit cards and more from your mobile phone at the point of sale. And the third pillar of Visa’s mobile strategy is incorporating value-added services like real-time alerts, contextual services, and offers at point of shopping based on where you are.

Gajda explains that Visa is licensing mobile payments applications PayWave for integration with the ISIS wallet and the company is actively looking for other ways to integrate with NFC into the company’s mobile payments structure.