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Any doubts that the mobile phone, rather than the personal computer, is the most effective way to deliver interactive services in developing countries should be dispelled by the launch of a new m-learning service in Bangladesh.

Even before the BBC's Janala service, teaching English using mobile phones, had gone live, more than 300,000 Bangladeshis had signed up for the course, according to The Financial Times. The manager of the service, which is run by the BBC World Service Trust, told the FT she had only been expecting 25,000 to sign up initially.  read more »

It has taken a little while, but it looks like Qualcomm’s smartbook concept is finally about to be tested in the marketplace.  At an investor day in New York, the chip-maker’s CEO, Paul Jacobs, said that its Snapdragon processor will feature in a Lenovo smartbook, which is essentially a cross between a smartphone and a notebook computer, to be launched by AT&T at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.  read more »

It looks like the big guns are getting serious about mobile advertising - Google's move to buy AdMob, one of the leading mobile display advertising networks, for $750 million in stock is the giant Internet company's third largest acquisition to date.  read more »

A mobile operator could build up a detailed profile of its prepaid customers just by analysing their call and location records, according to Greg Skibiski, CEO of Sense Networks, a well-publicised New York-based start-up backed by Intel Capital.  read more »

As mobile base stations now cover 90% of the world’s population, in this era of rising concern about global warming, why not use this existing infrastructure to monitor in real-time and in detail what is actually happening with the environment?  read more »

Anyone trying to figure out a business model for digital content should keep an eye on the results of a forthcoming experiment by Condé Nast. The leading publishing house plans to reproduce its December edition of the glossy men’s magazine GQ, page-for-page, advert-for-advert, as an iPhone app, which will be sold through the App Store for three dollars, compared with five dollars for the print edition.  read more »

Adobe Systems has announced that the first full Flash player to be compatible with smartphones will be available soon, meaning that users of the high-end handsets will finally be able to browse Web sites in all their Flash-animated glory. 

Adobe says a “public developer beta” version will be available for Windows Mobile and Palm webOS, as well as desktop operating systems, before the end of this year, followed by beta versions for Android and Symbian early in 2010. It also plans to work with RIM to make the new Flash player compatible with Blackberries.  read more »

Dell has come up with an innovative, if rather inelegant, solution to the dilemma faced by many road warriors. With ten minutes to kill at the airport or hotel, do you power up your laptop to write a few emails and endure the lengthy boot-up process or do you painstakingly punch out the messages on the small keypad of your Blackberry, or even worse, the virtual keyboard of the iPhone.  read more »

It looks like the next virtual operator to try and crack the U.K. mobile market is going to use crowdsourcing techniques to keep its costs as close to zero as it can get away with. Apparently backed by O2 UK, giffgaff says it will ask its members (customers) to help it determine what services to offer, plan its marketing, produce its adverts and recruit more customers. In return, members who get involved will be rewarded with rebates.  read more »

The Financial Times recently flagged an intriguing idea from Robo.to, the Web site that lets people post three second videos from a webcam or a camera phone on to a Web site – a kind of video version of Twitter. Robo.to is apparently planning to launch an iPhone and an Android app in the next few months that will replace the regular caller ID with the caller’s latest personal video, photograph and location, according to the newspaper. The screen could also show the caller’s most recent text updates from Twitter or another social network.  read more »

Unlikely as it seems, residents of Moldova, a small and impoverished country in eastern Europe, recently became the first people in the world to be able to make high-definition mobile phone calls. Orange, the mobile operator launching the service, claims that locals have been astonished by the quality and sensitivity of HD voice calls, which reputedly can pick up whispers and enable crystal clear conversations even in train stations and other noisy environments.  read more »

Despite living deep in the shadows of more glamorous 3G technologies, EDGE is alive and kicking hard, judging by an announcement yesterday by Nokia Siemens Networks. The equipment vendor said that trials of the awkwardly-named EDGE Evolution Downlink Dual Carrier in China found that this new technology permitted peak downlink rates of 600 kilobits per second, enabling smooth live video streaming from Sina and YouTube.   read more »

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