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The worldwide mobile phone market grew 12.8% year over year in the third quarter of 2011 (3Q11), as smartphone growth declined in key mature markets. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped 393.7 million units in 3Q11 compared to 348.9 million units in the third quarter of 2010. However, the 12.8% growth was higher than IDC's forecast of 9.3% for the quarter and stronger than the 9.8% growth in 2Q11.

It was also the second-lowest growth rate for the overall mobile phone market over the past two years; a reflection of delayed smartphone purchases and conservative consumer spending last quarter.

"The combination of economic uncertainty and anticipation over fourth quarter or late third quarter product releases caused some consumers to delay their smartphone purchases," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker. "Many waited for products such as the iPhone 4S, which was announced after the quarter closed, or Research In Motion's BlackBerry 7 phone series, which were released in the final weeks of the quarter."

Computer-maker NEC calls them the latest in eyewear for the linguistically challenged. The TeleScouter integrates spectacle frames with a personal mini-computer and a head-mounted display unit. The result is a portable language translator. TeleScouter allows two or more people with no language in common, to hold a conversation. One user will begin the conversation in their native language and, with the press of a button send the recorded words to a remote server where they are analyzed and translated. The server then sends the translation to the receiving user who can read the words in their own language on the head-mounted display unit. While the technology is still in its developmental stages, NEC says a faster unit is on the horizon and that the hope is to break down language barriers. [Kotaro Nagahama, NEC Manager]: "With this you don't have to think about having to translate yourself your own words. All you have to do is speak in your own words and that gets communicated to the other person and you don't have to do any thinking. You just have you use your own language. " But TeleScouter will not be cheap. When it reaches the market it'll sell for around $83,000 although the price will come down over time. If all goes according to plan, NEC says foreign tourists will one day, with great confidence be able to tell their hosts "I see what you're saying."

A recent video released by Hidden Creative has caused some discussion over augmented reality among netizens. The video explains that augmented reality technology is the way of the future. Users are able to use their cellphones or digital device to scan their surrounding and find out live information on the spot. The video also demonstrates how augmented reality can also overlay objects in a real-life space to help users with renovations by virtually rearranging furniture or configuring the colors virtually. Nevertheless, although most reactions to the video have been quite positive and enthusiastic, some bloggers are little bit more skeptical as to whether augmented reality is here to stay. Comments from Digital Urban included: “We maybe wrong but waving your phone around simply does not feel like the future to us”, “Augmented reality often just seems to be cool rather than actually good enough to be useful” and also “The way AR is presented here is not a step forward, it’s a step backward actually”.

Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. The details around investors (Eric Schmidt, Mike Olson and SV Angel) and Bisciglia’s history at Cloudera and Google have made the rounds already, but what’s not as widely known is how WibiData actually works.

Here’s how Monash describes the essence of WibiData: WibiData is designed for management of, investigative analytics on, and operational analytics on consumer internet data, the main examples of which are web site traffic and personalization and their analogues for games and/or mobile devices. The core WibiData technology, built on HBase and Hadoop,* is a data management and analytic execution layer. That’s where the secret sauce resides. Also included are:

If keeping a food diary seems like too much effort, despair not: computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have devised a tool that lets you snap a photo of your meal and let the crowd do the rest.

PlateMate's calorie estimates have proved, in tests, to be just as accurate as those of trained nutritionists, and more accurate than the user's own logs. The research was presented at the 24th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, a leading conference on human-computer interaction.

“We can take things that used to require experts and do them with crowds,” says Jon Noronha ’11, who co-developed PlateMate as an undergraduate at Harvard and now works at Microsoft. "Estimating the nutritional value of a meal is a fairly complex task, from a computational standpoint, but with a structured workflow and some cultural awareness, we've expanded what crowdsourcing can achieve."

On the surface, social media and knowledge management (KM) seem very similar. Both involve people using technology to access information. Both require individuals to create information intended for sharing. Both profess to support collaboration. But there's a big difference. Knowledge management is what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important. Social media is how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself. These definitions may sound harsh, and biased in favor of social media, and to some extent they are. Knowledge should be like water — free-flowing and permeating down and across your organization filling the cracks, floating good ideas to the top and lifting all boats.

Social media looks downright chaotic by comparison. There is no predefined index, no prequalified knowledge creators, no knowledge managers and ostensibly little to no structure. Where an organization has a roof, gutters and cistern to capture knowledge, a social media organization has no roof, allowing the "rain" to fall directly into the house, collecting in puddles wherever they happen to form. That can be quite messy. And organizations abhor a mess.

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.

The latest is a survey showing that IT professionals expect tablets to outnumber desktop machines in schools within the next five years.

The results, revealed by a Piper Jaffray analyst, point to the growing popularity of the iPad among technology directors at schools, all of whom are already testing and deploying the device on some level. The survey cited didn't have the biggest sample size (only 25 were polled), but the trend is consistent with other reports we've seen, and certainly Apple has been pushing the device for educational purposes.

Administering the devices from an IT standpoint can be challenging in a school environment, something that's already being felt in the enterprise market. It's an issue that school IT directors are already dealing with in school districts that hand out laptops to students.