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When it comes to mobile Augmented Reality technology, Qualcomm is the top dog. The San Diego company has the biggest AR R&D unit in the world and the message from its recent Uplinq conference in California was clear - it thinks that AR is going to play a significant role in shaping the mobile media horizon.

Qualcomm's senior director of business development Jay Wright

"For Qualcomm, we think the technology is interesting, we follow it closely but it's not on our near to mid-term horizon. This is beyond the five to eight year window," he said.

Without so much as a whisper from the retailer itself, Amazon’s Android tablet is heading our way. Rumoured to launch at the end of the third quarter in time for the holiday season, Amazon is hoping it can steal a little of Apple’s thunder and steal a little of its market share.

Amazon’s decision to launch an Appstore was a surprising one, especially because there was no shortage of alternative Android marketplaces at the time. Incorporating its patented recommendation system and its “Free App A Day”, the third-party application store won many fans in the US primarly because it has been providing customers with downloads of some of the most popular Android apps and games.

Amazon is one of, if not the world’s number one Cloud storage and service provider and is seen by many to have led the march towards the Cloud, with affordable and reliable online services that even the most bootstrapped startups could afford. Asserting itself in the hosting market has helped the company make the best of its other web-based services, namely online music downloads and its new Android Appstore.

How could Google, the high priest of the cloud and the parent of Android, analytics and AdWords/AdSense, not be a standard-setter for platform creation?

Amazon's strategy seems to be to embrace "open" Android and use it to make a platform that's proprietary to Amazon, that's a heck of a story to watch unfold in the months ahead. Even more so, knowing that Amazon has serious platform mojo.

Case in point, what company other than Apple could have executed something even remotely as rich and well-integrated as the simultaneous release of iOS 5, iCloud and iPhone 4S, the latter of which sold four million units in its first weekend of availability?

With the excitement surrounding the arrival of undersea cables in Sub-Saharan Africa and the prospects of the smartphone revolution in bringing mobile connectivity to most parts of the continent, it is easy to forget for instance that the continent still has 1 domain per 10,000 users.

In education, there are the vast prospects that e-learning provides for students, but doing this in a way that scales is difficult in Africa’s low bandwidth environment. There are also prospects in various sectors ranging from agriculture to finance each with its own unique set of challenges.

Amidst this backdrop, the obvious respite for bridging the access gap appears to be through smart phones. However, majority of Africans can only afford the cheapest of phones which are typically low end phones. To truly expand access, smart phone prices will need to crash drastically and rural connectivity would need to expand dramatically. Save for these two actions, revolutionizing the continent via the Internet will continue to remain a pipe dream.

Mobile device usage has spread across the globe. In terms of mobile penetration, the United States is actually on the lower end of the worldwide spectrum, with only 77% cellular device ownership. That seems counterintuitive to the way the U.S. views itself as the heart of mobile acceptance and innovation. It is China and other Asia-Pacific countries that really lead in mobile adoption. Research firm Forrester released a study last week showing global mobile usage trends. In almost every mobile usage aspect, metropolitan China and other Pacific Rim countries lead the way. That includes mobile social usage, work usage and multiple device ownership. Mobile is near an inflection point, changing the way people interact with information around the globe.

Your mobile wireless carrier may soon have a say in the way you think about health and wellness. AT&T, through its Emerging Devices unit, plans to offer for sale health-tracking clothing equipped with wireless sensors that enable you to track your heart rate, body temperature and other vital signs -- and then send all this data to a site where a physician can access it. The first offering will be a version of the E39 body compression shirt, originally designed by Under Armour for the NFL scouting combines and other world-class athletic competitions. Now imagine yourself as a high-performance weekend athlete, effortlessly transmitting your heart rate, skin temperature and activity levels to the Web. That the “smart fitness” trend – which can be traced back to the Fitbit tracker – is now transforming into a broader “e-wellness” movement is not a coincidence. The biggest wireless network carriers - like AT&T – are under intense pressure to produce new revenue streams. The total mobile Internet penetration rates at these companies have hit a saturation point. They can advertise as much as they want, but there’s simply no one else who needs another mobile phone these days.