Inset is Tobias Ryberg, senior analyst, Berg Insight quoted below.

GSM and legacy technologies currently dominate the market and accounted for about 71 percent of the total number of active connections at the end of 2007. CDMA was the second largest technology with a strong foothold in North America and parts of Asia-Pacific. WCDMA has so far primarily been adopted for machine-to-machine applications in Japan. Elsewhere the adoption is held back by high component costs and limited network coverage.

Read more here.

11:00-12:00 PM , Oh, let's stay in the clouds for our last word in business today. And that last word is smell phone. German researchers have apparently patented a chip for sending smells through mobile phones. Think of it as a kind of scratch and sniff text message. Do you really want to smell the person you're talking with on the telephone? Some people must, because this chip has been in the works for eight years, and may not be on the market for another two.

If it does come out, a spokesperson for a German technology company says people will be able to send the scent of the ocean breeze while on vacation. They'll be able to mark special occasions be sending an aromatic e-bouquet. You will need a special phone to do this.

And if you are worried about unpleasant fragrances wafting out of the mobile phone, don't worry, because the company spokesperson contends the technology allows recipients to reject smells that they don't want - the same way you can reject some numbers.

And that's the business news on MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

Even if we did not have this acknowledgment, the claim that RF energy from two mobile phones can cook an egg in 60 minutes cannot be true as it is impossible for the egg’s temperature to rise to a level that will cook the egg. We can demonstrate this as follows: even if you assume that each mobile phone is emitting RF energy at its maximum average power of 0.25 W (based on a peak power of 2 W per phone) for 60 minutes; and even if the total power (2 X 0.25 W = 0.5 W) of both phones was completely absorbed by the egg (assuming it weighs 50 g), then the result would be a maximum temperature rise after 60 minutes of only 13 °C. Even if the egg was at room temperature before starting the experiment, the result would still be far below the temperature actually needed to cook an egg (which is approx. 65 - 70 °C)4, 5.

Read more here.

18-19 September 2008, Sheraton Voyager, Antalya, Turkey

http://www.mgovernment.org/events/

SPONSORS, ORGANIZERS and SUPPORTERS:

--- TURKCELL (Diamond Sponsor), TurkSat (Gold Sponsor)

--- Mobile Government Consortium International, UK, AykeyNet, UK

--- Dept. of Computer Engineering, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey,

--- Center for Information and Society, University of Washington, USA.

Mobile Society refers to the emerging trends of the collective life on earth driven by the technology of networked mobile phones and other mobile devices. These technologies and their fast and wide adoption are influencing the way we live in society, the way we run businesses and the way we are as an individual.

The First International Conference on Mobile Society (mSociety 2008) aims to be a platform for the presentation, exchange and dissemination of the latest developments, ideas, applications and services involving all aspects of practice and research in mSociety.

The mSociety 2008 organization invites all professionals with an interest in how mobility influences society in both positive and

negative ways. Possible perspectives may include, but are not limited to, the diffusion and adoption of technology; the dissemination of mobile content, applications and services for business and entertainment; the economical, sociological and psychological impact of mobility on society.

Read more here.

15-16 September 2008, Sheraton Voyager, Antalya, Turkey

http://www.mgovernment.org/events/

SPONSORS, ORGANIZERS and SUPPORTERS:

--- TURKCELL (Diamond Sponsor), TurkSat (Gold Sponsor)

--- Mobile Government Consortium International, UK; AykeyNet, UK

--- Dept. of Computer Engineering, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey,

--- Center for Information and Society, University of Washington, USA.

Mobile Government involves revolutionary approaches to the modernization of public sector via the utilization of networked mobile

technologies in local or central government organizations. It aims to enhance public sector business by creating new opportunities to provide services to society. mGovernment is now a recognized field of practice and research, and constitutes the next evolutionary step of progress in eGovernment.

EURO mGOV 2008 aims to be a platform for presenting, exchanging and disseminating the latest developments, ideas, applications and services in the field of mGovernment among three essential constituents: public / private sector professionals and researchers.

The EURO mGOV 2008 organization invites all professionals with an interest in the interfaces of Electronic Government and Mobile

Business, both from social and technological perspectives.

Read more here.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this survey is that 35 percent of US users say they never use text messaging. At all. Ever. I’m struggling with this bit - I know shedloads of people who have no interesting in using any mobile data services, but not one who doesn’t send a text now and then.

http://www.smstextnews.com/2008/04/one_third_of_americans_dont_use_sms.html

Prepare to see less of your office, more of your family—and still perhaps be unhappy

SOMETIMES the biggest changes in society are the hardest to spot precisely because they are hiding in plain sight. It could well be that way with wireless communications. Something that people think of as just another technology is beginning to show signs of changing lives, culture, politics, cities, jobs, even marriages dramatically. In particular, it will usher in a new version of a very old idea: nomadism.

Futurology is a dangerous business, and it is true that most of the important arguments about mobile communications at the moment are to do with technology or regulation—bandwidth, spectrum use and so on. Yet it is worth jumping ahead, as our special report does rather adventurously this week, and wondering what the social effects will be, for two reasons. First, the broad technological future is pretty clear: there will be ever faster cellular networks, far more numerous Wi-Fi “hotspots” and many more gadgets to connect to these networks. Second, the social changes are already visible: parents on beaches waving at their children while typing furtively on their BlackBerrys; entrepreneurs discovering they don't need offices after all (if you need to recharge something, you just go to Starbucks); teenagers text-dumping their boyfriends. Everybody is doing more on the move.

Read more here.

Wireless communication is changing the way people work, live, love and relate to places—and each other, says Andreas Kluth (interviewed here)

AT THE Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café's wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn't usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad”. That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her “work stuff” at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads.

Christopher Waters, the owner, opened the Nomad Café in 2003, just as Wi-Fi “hotspots” were mushrooming all around town. His idea was to provide a watering-hole for “techno-Bedouins” such as himself, he says. Since Bedouins, whether in Arabian deserts or American suburbs, are inherently tribal and social creatures, he understood from the outset that a good oasis has to do more than provide Wi-Fi; it must also become a new—or very old—kind of gathering place. He thought of calling his café the “Gypsy Spirit Mission”, which also captures the theme of mobility, but settled for the simpler Nomad.

Read more here.

It matters

MICHAEL HALBHERR was driving from Berlin to Budapest the other day when he passed what looked like an empty field. The fact that his mobile phone stayed quiet annoyed him. Here he was, speeding by the site of Napoleon's great victory at Austerlitz, and nothing even vibrated.

Mr Halbherr, admittedly, had professional reasons to ponder this shortcoming. He runs “location-based services” (LBS) for Nokia, the world's largest handset-maker. Not letting things such as Austerlitz slip by unnoticed is exactly what LBS is in business for. Some people think it is the “next big thing”. It was Nokia's reason for spending $8.1 billion to buy Navteq, a firm that collects map data around the world.

One advantage that mobile phones have over PCs is that they increasingly know and care where they are. Some use the global positioning system (GPS), which uses satellites, others a slightly less accurate method that calculates the distances of nearby cellular towers and Wi-Fi hotspots.

This is a huge advance, says Stephen Johnson, one of Nokia's strategists, because it adds the third element (“where”) required to understand a person's context, the other two being who and when. Most obviously, this means that “the idea of being lost will be unheard of”, he says. More interestingly, it allows people to become “more immersed in the real world around them”. Within a few years, for example, phones will know where you are at what time, and where you are going next, based on your electronic diary. The phone may also know, from your address book, that you have a friend in the building whose diary says that he is going to the same place. Your two phones will alert you so that you can share a taxi. If you have been sleeping with his wife, or are just not feeling very sociable that day, you can always claim that your battery died at that very instant.

When everybody becomes a nomadic monitor

UNTIL a couple of years ago election monitoring was a fiddly, exhausting and often thankless business. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as America's National Democratic Institute (NDI) would send idealistic student volunteers to complicated places such as Nigeria to observe the balloting, write down data on pieces of paper and then carry or fax the forms somewhere for manual input into a computer system. The process was slow and unreliable. Fraud or violence, if it broke out, spread far faster than credible information.

Then, in 2006, a penny dropped. NDI, working with an organisation in Montenegro, realised that practically everybody in that country already had the perfect tool to monitor, in all but real time, its election that May. That tool was the mobile phone and its ability to send text messages directly to a computer. The new approach worked so well that it instantly became the standard for monitoring other precarious elections. A vote in Sierra Leone last August briefly threatened to disintegrate amid rumours of violence—also spread through text messages—but quickly returned to order when some 500 observers at the various polling stations sent text messages to the central system saying that the rumours were false.

Read more here.