During the recent Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, 3G strategy consultant Tomi Ahonen took the stage to talk about the prospect of mobile technology and how it changes the world. Here are the highlights from his keynote: Mobile is the fastest way to reach consumers. According to a study conducted in New Zealand, e-mail is read 48 hours after it is sent, while the average SMS is read in four minutes. In other words, SMS is 720 times faster than e-mail in message-opening throughput. Nokia reported that the average person … Read more

North Korea has hit an important milestone, having reached one million mobile phone users. The only mobile operator in the country, Koryolink, has seen a surge in the number of customers, with some 100,000 people signing-up during the each of the last five quarters. Koryolink, which is 75% owned by Egypt’s Orascom Telecom and 25% by the state-run Korea Post and Telecommunications Corporation, said they’re now covering 14% of the country’s landmass, but that equates to around 94% of the population. It’s good to see that even in places like … Read more

It’s a new (and logical) trend in the world to allow folks commuting to use the underground railway system to access mobile network(s). The capital of Italy doesn’t want to be an exception and has decided to offer its customers the ability to talk, text and access Internet services while taking a ride. CommScope got the contract from a consortium of the country’s four mobile networks (Telecom Italia, Vodafone, WIND and H3G) to make this happen. It’s a three-phase project that is expected to be completed by the end of … Read more

When it comes to positioning systems, U.S. has GPS, Russia has Glonass and EU – Galileo. China is joining the race and has finally launched its own such system called Beidou. According to a spokesman for the system, Beidou has started providing initial positioning, navigation and timing operational services to China and its surrounding areas. However, the coverage will expand soon with six more satellites set for launch in 2012 to cover most parts of the Asia-Pacific region. The world’s most populous country started developing its positioning system in 2000 … Read more

I always knew Thailand is far from a functional democracy, but I thought people can still say what they want. Apparently I was sooo wrong. A retired truck driver was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sending SMS that a court deemed insulting to Thailand’s monarchy. 61-year-old Ampon Tangnoppakul got 5 years in prison for each message sent, though he denied sending any messages. According to his lawyer, Ampon doesn’t know how to send SMS and his phone was being repaired around the time the messages were sent! But … Read more

When Intel bets on a certain type of technology, it usually becomes a standard. That’s the kind of power they have because of their massive scale. An astonishing 80.2% of the computers that were sold in Q3 of this year had Intel chips inside. MasterCard, looking to take advantage of Intel’s dominance, has announced that they’ve partnered with the chip giant so that future personal computers will be able to read PayPass enabled credit/debit cards. The deal is a “multi-year strategic collaboration”, which means it’ll take a while before you’ll … Read more

Last week ARM announced that Tudor Brown, President and Co-founder of the British semiconductor company, is going to retire in May 2012. Since the inception of ARM in 1990, their technology has shipped in over 15 billion chips. What makes ARM such a unique company, and what’s given them the success that they’re now experiencing, is that they look at the business model of microprocessors from a completely different angle. Instead of designing chips and then making them in fabs that cost far too much to build, maintain, and upgrade … Read more

Apple has been getting a lot of heat over the years for their refusal to support Adobe’s Flash software. Companies such as Nokia, RIM, and even Google in the mean time have proudly been standing tall and shouting at the top of their lungs about how their platforms are technically superior because they can render every website that exists on the internet. Steve Jobs, till the day he died, firmly held on to the belief that Adobe should go screw themselves. In fact, he even wrote a 1,700 word letter … Read more