Mobile handsets have a bad habit of oversharing with the networks they operate on, with some handsets being chattier than others. This signaling data, as it’s known in the industry, can congest mobile networks, and Traffix Systems, a six-year-old Israeli company wants to help operators solve that problem.

The company said Wednesday that it raised a first round of $7 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners to help it expand operations. Ben Volkow, the CEO, says that 60 percent of operators already have some Traffix gear on their networks to address and manage signaling traffic, but more operators are interested. As more operators began deploying LTE networks, which add to the complexity of signaling traffic and to the overall network, Volkow decided that his previous strategy of growing the business through bootstrapping it no longer made sense. “We needed to scale and grow the business,” he said in an interview.

Signaling traffic is the data the phone or device sends out to the network to tell it where it is, what is it is doing, how much it is allowed to do based on the subscriber’s plan and figure out when to hop to the next base station. Chetan Sharma, a wireless analyst, issued a report last year noting that network congestion is generally caused by two big things: (1) signaling traffic caused by smartphones and superphones and (2) peak data traffic caused by data cards and embedded laptops.

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.

While growth in usage of social media by the public continues to grow unabated, new research shows that social media usage among large companies is leveling off. The research from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth shows that corporate use of networks like Facebook and Twitter plateaued in 2011. The study looked at outward facing social media usage by Fortune 500 companies, and found that adoption of blogs, Twitter and Facebook did not rise from 2010 to 2011. Just under 1/4 of the Fortune 500 have a public facing blog. While this is an increase from the 16% measured in 2008, it has not increased at all since last year. Likewise, Twitter usage has only increased by 2% in the last year, from 60% last year to 62% this year. Only 58% of large companies have a Facebook page; however, another 2% rise from last years figure. Astonishingly, 31% have no presence on either Facebook or Twitter at all. This follows research last week revealing that 1 in 5 small business owners hate social media.  Bete noir of the industry was Groupon, with a whopping 70% of SMEs reporting their dislike of the coupon website.

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.

Just under half of the UK population now owns a smartphone, and Google's mobile operating system Android is powering half of those those being sold – followed by RIM's BlackBerry models with 22.5% and Apple's iPhone at 18.5%.

The pace of smartphone sales is accelerating rapidly, too. In the 12 weeks to 2 October, they comprised just under 70% of mobile phones, according to new research from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Dominic Sunnebo, Kantar's global consumer insight director, warned that the next year could see a lot of jockeying for customers.""Over the next six to 12 months, the current group of Android owners will be coming to the end of their contracts and looking for an upgrade," he said."Our data shows that when these consumers upgrade they tend to remain fairly loyal to Android itself – 62% buy another Android mobile – but considerably less so to the handset manufacturer."

It appears that offering all-you-can-eat data packages for its smartphone customers has tempted a fair number of customers after UK mobile operator Three announced that data now constitutes 97% of the network traffic flowing through its networks.

Three is now the UK’s fastest growing mobile network, buoyed by an increase in mobile consumers switching from its rivals with promises of unlimited data on both its monthly and pay-as-you-go tariffs, resulting in a 427% increase in data usage on its networks, as customers use their connections to download apps, stream films and TV shows and check their social networking accounts on the go.

2008 Elections From the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses to the Nov. 4 general election, information graphics were a major component of the New York Times election coverage. Interactive maps on the nytimes.com home page and inside the web site were rich with information, but easy to navigate.

2008 Olympics Coverage In August 2008, The New York Times graphics department published more than 30 interactive graphics covering subjects ranging from the Olympic torch to the medal count. The package included graphics produced in advance of the games, plus more than a dozen produced on deadline analyzing results from a vareity of events. Because NBC tape-delayed the showing of many events, these graphics frequently were readers' first visual picture of how a race was won.

Flight 1549 Lands in the Hudson River When U.S. Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing in the Hudson River, graphics editors immediately began reporting what happened in the air, building 3-D models of the plane and developing an interactive graphic. The graphic was initially published the same day as the emergency landing, and updated over the next several days as more information was released. Published Jan. 15, 2009

NEC has launched a wearable computer, the NEC TeleScouter, intended to allow fieldworkers to consult a virtual 16-inch transparent display projected in front of them while they go about their business. Consisting of a Brother AirScouter wearable display and a compact 500MHz ARM-based computer packing WiFi a/b/g and Bluetooth, the system currently targets industrial augmented reality (AR) applications, but NEC sees the future being far broader.

In fact, the target is AR that can remind you of the identity of acquaintances when you bump into them at parties, pull up information on products you’ve bought but haven’t kept the user guide to hand, and other more personal applications. NEC is also working on the potential input and control methods, such as sensors which would allow you to tap your arm in different ways to trigger functionality.

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”.

By providing an open platform for the creation of augmented-reality layers, these apps have democratised the AR industry - and made possible flights of fancy such as Unseen Sculptures, in which new-media artist Warren Armstrong and nearly two dozen others collaborated to populate central Melbourne and Sydney with a range of virtual artworks that "appeared" when smartphones running the Layar app were pointed at particular parts of the city."I'm fascinated by mobile devices and their ubiquity," says Armstrong, who has spearheaded the project's expansion - including planned engagements with the Sydney Fringe Festival, Cairns Festival and other projects. "It's very immersive: you can go to a location, put on headphones and do amazing things with sounds. Layar takes care of the fiddly back-end stuff for people who aren't au fait with PHP or MySQL programming. The whole thing is in its infancy, and there's a lot of scope for creating new things."

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."

Used to be if spies wanted to eavesdrop, they planted a bug. These days, it's much easier. Because we all carry potential bugs in our pockets—smartphones. One team of researchers used an iPhone to track typing on a nearby computer keyboard with up to 80 percent accuracy.

The researchers designed a malicious app for the iPhone 4. When you place the phone near a keyboard, it exploits accelerometer and gyroscope data to sense vibrations as the victim types—detecting whether keystrokes come from the left or right side of the keyboard, and how near or far subsequent keys are from each other. Then, using that seismic fingerprint, the app checks a pre-created "vibrational" dictionary for the most likely words—a technique that works reliably on words of three letters or more.

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.

Cloud computing has been eyed for some time as a solution for business continuity needs, as the thought of setting up new virtual servers on an automated, on-demand basis seems highly appealing. But when it comes to figuring out the kind of cloud offerings that will work best for business continuity, typically private cloud options are usually the ones considered. The reason for this bias is the configuration of the virtual machines themselves. While public cloud services can afford business clients a lot of computing power in a hurry for a low rate, that combination does not always equate to a continuity friendly environment.

Then there are the security concerns. If you are patching your own systems diligently, is the cloud provider providing the same patched for their own base operating systems? What other kind of security protocols are in place? On the legal side of the equation, does the cloud provider meet compliance in the areas of data breach notification, data retention, auditing, and whatever other compliance regulations you need to follow? What are the local laws for the datacenter and how do they comply with your own corporate needs in terms of security?

Young British teenagers would be less worried at being deprived of television than losing access to the internet or their mobile phones, as attachment to the medium slides among the young, according to new research from Ofcom.

On average, they watch 17 hours 37 minutes per week, up from 15 hours 37 minutes in 2007.Internet use has also become pervasive, with 95% of 12- to 15-year-olds having internet access at home through a computer. But the research by the communications watchdog also points to a "digital divide", in which only 80% of children in lower socioeconomic groups have access to the internet at home, compared to 98% in the richest ones.

The annual survey was carried out in spring with 1,717 in-home interviews, and focused on attitudes to communications technology by parents and children. It found that 28% of children aged 12 to 15 said they would most miss their mobile, and 25% would most miss the internet if deprived of them – compared to only 18% citing television. A year ago mobile was the most desired, while TV was level-pegging with the internet at 24%.

What do smartphones, tablets, and self-service business information tools have in common? All three are on high-growth trajectories for enterprise adoption. In a new report issued last week by Forrester Research called called TechRadar For Enterprise Architecture Professionals: Technologies For Empowered Employees, Q4 2011, it shows how these and others have taken over the enterprise. It is the classic IT problem. As Gene Leganza writes in the introduction, "Mobile, social, video, and cloud technologies give individuals tremendous access to information and resources. Employees can become the best source of innovation and the breakthrough ideas that CxOs are hungry for. But as employees become empowered, central IT begins losing control of the technology strategy."

Although Siri is limited in what it can do, what it does do, it does well. And based on my experiences with Siri so far, I think it illustrates what I think of as the “invisible interfaces” of future connected devices. Admittedly, that sound like a bold claim, but the reality is this: Thanks to the “Internet of Things,” more devices are gaining connectivity that makes them smarter and more useful. At the same time, computing interfaces haven’t changed all that much in the past several decades. They’re going to have to, however, as we can’t have a multitude of different interfaces across a myriad of connected devices in this new world.

The key for potential success here is in Siri’s uncanny ability to understand not just natural language input, but also context. This is great for smartphones where we have so much personal data such as contact names, addresses, phone numbers and digital music tracks. Even better is when Siri works with multiple apps or services on our handsets; tying them together through a simple command. “Remind me to take out the trash when I get home,” for example, leverages both the Reminders application and the integrated GPS radio of an iPhone.

“Close the windows and turn on the air conditioning if the outside temperature rises above 85 degrees,” could be a real-world example in just a few years time.