As Number of Smartphones Passes 1Bn, 2Bn is Tipped to Come by 2015

The number of smartphones in use worldwide has passed the 1 billion mark for the first time, according to analyst firm Strategy Analytics, which estimates the landmark was surpassed during the third quarter of 2012. Strategy Analytics believes that there were 708 million smartphones one year ago, during the third quarter of 2011, and that figure grew by nearly 300 million to hit 1.038 billion units during the most recent quarter.

Leathernext: Marines Want Better Networks, Sensors — And Terminator Vision | Danger Room | Wired.com

The Marines of the future are all about communication.

The Leathernecks want data networks that can keep them connected all the way from the decks of their ships to the beaches they storm. They want online search tools that rely on natural language instead of keywords (like the rest of us). And they want software that can sift through the oceans of data their wartime sensors and cameras collect — including tools that can scan through faces in a crowd, like the Terminator, and alert Marines to danger.

That’s according to the Corps’ blueprint for its science and technology needs over the next 20 years. Communications are a big, gaping hole for the Marines of the present, and the Marines want to hand their successors more seamless, networked ways of talking. That’s on top of other wish-list material, like advanced sensors that can sniff drugs and homemade bombs — oh, and laser-stopping goggles.

The blueprint (.pdf), first published by Inside Defense, doesn’t come out and criticize the Corps’ current suite of communications tools and sensors. But there’s a yawning technological chasm in-between the present-day Marines and where the Leathernecks want to be in 2025.

From “flagpole to fighting hole,” the blueprint writes, Marines need to be in constant communication: “The objective is to provide a holistic, end-to-end, turnkey [command-and-control] capability to execute commander’s intent, facilitate implicit communications, visualize battlespace reality, promote initiative, enable centralized command and decentralized control, and ultimately accomplish the mission.”

Forget 3G and 4G, terahertz could make cell phones 1,000 times faster | BGR.com

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh announced that they have discovered a means of wirelessly transmitting data thousands of times faster than current standards, PCMag reported on Wednesday. The team is led by Hrvoje Petek, a physics and chemistry professor at the university, who has theoretically found a way to transmit data between devices in the terahertz frequency. Petek’s discovery of “a physical basis for terahertz bandwidth” could potentially be used to leverage the “portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwave light” and transmit data at rates 1,000 times faster than today’s wireless standards, which are limited to the gigahertz frequency. “The ability to modulate light with such a bandwidth could increase the amount of information carried by more than 1,000 times when compared to the volume carried with today’s technologies,” Petek said. “Needless to say, this has been a long-awaited discovery in the field.”

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Avado Launches ‘Patient Relationship Management’ Platform To Help Healthcare Providers Go Digital | TechCrunch

Back in May, Avado was chosen as a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC. The startup’s ambition was, said in reductive terms, to become the Salesforce.com of personal health records. (You can read our initial coverage here.) In other words, like Salesforce’s “customer relationship management” (CRM), Avado is building a “patient relationship management” (PRM) platform in an attempt to create a more fluid and communicative relationship between patients and doctors — by way of connected health records.

The future of medical practice, Avado CEO Dave Chase says, is very clear: “It’s about being accountable and patient-centric”. The old model for care providers was do more and bill more, but today those who pay for health care, from private insurance and government to consumers themselves want to pay when their health goals are achieved — today it’s about patient satisfaction. Thus, core to Avado’s value proposition is that, through richer and more frequent communication, patients are far more likely to stay healthy and actualize the steps set forth in a care regimen prescribed by doctors.

How can a university best use social media for internal communications? | Guardian Professional

Does your university really need a staff newsletter or a Facebook page? Tracy Playle explains why social media strategies need a clear objective to drive their purpose

Increasingly, universities are beginning to explore the use of social media (or new media) for engaging with their internal constituents (sometimes known as “enterprise 2.0”). But how can a university make a success of using social media internally and not waste endless resource implementing tools that nobody will ever use? Clear objectives and an understanding of the university culture are key.

TxtEagle Raises $8.5 Million To Give 2.1 Billion A Voice

Never mind tablets, smartphones, and mobile-social-location-photo-sharing apps. Heck, never mind computers. The single most important technology of the last half-century, the one that has most drastically changed the day-to-day existence of very nearly everyone on Earth, remains the plain old GSM phone: unloved and half-forgotten in NYC and Silicon Valley — but still used by the billion in the rest of the world.

That’s why Boston-based TxtEagle last week raised $8.5 million from a consortium including Spark Capital and RBC Venture Partners. Well, that plus a clever business model, a nifty technology platform, and partnerships with 220 mobile operators in almost 100 countries who between them cover 2.1 billion subscribers.

TxtEagle offers crowdsourcing and market research in developing markets. Clients such as UN researchers or advertisers hire them to survey masses of people; TxtEagle then forwards the survey (or other task) to thousands of individual members via their GSM phones, and pays them upon completion. You might guess that they communicate via SMS, and pay with cash — but no.

“People think we’re an SMS-focused company, and we’re really not,” says Nathan Eagle, their CEO and co-founder. Instead they have built their own platform atop the USSD protocol that GSM phones use to communicate with their service providers. (For the techies among you, USSD is to SMS as telnet is to email.) USSD communications are free, which gives TxtEagle a huge advantage in emerging markets where a) virtually all mobile service is prepaid, and b) the 10 cents it costs to send an SMS is a hefty chunk of the mere $2-3/day that many people make.

Source: TechCrunch